A little bit of info on the Motown drum sound from Pistol Allen & Uriel Jones…
“We experimented all kinds of ways,” explains Pistol Allen. “We played with the front bass drum head off with some blankets stuffed in it. They’d stick the mic right in there. For the snare, we’d place the microphone right on the head or sometimes on the side near the air hole. For the floor tom, I’d tune it to a G, and then they’d mike it from underneath with a boom stand.
“To get the right sound out of the snare drum,” Allen says, “we put electrical tape on the snares on the bottom head. We’d cut two little strips of tape and put one on each side of the strainer to keep the snares as close to the head as possible–you know, to get that tight, crisp sound.”
Jones also recalls duct taping a pad of Kleenex to the top snare head, and he also has a different spin on Pistol’s comments about tuning. “Those drums very rarely went out of tune,” Uriel says, “and besides, the engineers didn’t want us messing around with the tuning anyway. Once in a while if it got really out, you might pull out a drum key and give a half turn or so. But we usually came in and just started playing with what was already there.”
Both Allen and Jones, however, are in total agreement when it comes to the subject of drumheads. “We didn’t care what kind of drumheads we used on the set, and we hardly ever changed or broke them because we didn’t play that hard,” Pistol points out.
On the Stax sound: What a lot of people probably don’t understand is that the drums Al played, stayed there 24 hours a day, 365 days a year with the same microphones on them. It was that way for a long time, when we were cutting all the mono records, “Green Onions,” the Rufus Thomas stuff and all of that. Once they were there, it never changed, they never moved around any. Later, when we got into multi-track machines and overdubbing, some things changed. The other thing is that Al Jackson never changed his heads, unless he broke one. The same thing with the bass and guitar. If we broke a string we changed it, if we didn’t, it never got changed. Al never changed those drums. I think he had a Ludwig and Rogers combination, kind of a mix ‘n’ match. He had a medium size kick drum, 20-inch I believe, and he had a Rogers floor tom, grey pearl, and then a little 12-inch tom over head. It was a little black drum. The other thing that Al used to do that was different-he wasn’t the only drummer that ever did it- but when he came down to do a session, the first thing he did was reach in his back pocket, and pull out this big fat billfold and plop it on the snare. Other guys used tape or a muffler. Al just plopped a billfold down there. The old records didn’t have a lot of decay time, the snares didn’t ring too much and there’s not a lot of cymbals, because we didn’t mike the cymbals. Where were the mikes placed? We had an RCA capsule mike, a 44 or a 77, that looked like a big Tylenol. We had one of those on a small stand and we just brought it right straight up under the hi-hat, as high as we could to still be comfortable. It was a ribbon mike and it picked up everything around it and got the snare and the hi-hat. Then we had the old, big, black and chrome RCA microphone. It had big holes in it and they used them back in the old days in the radio shows. Sort of a giant shaver microphone about four inches wide. We used that for a long time on the kick drum. That’s all we had, two mikes. Was there a front head on the kick drum? Yes, there was. Way later, when Ronnie Capone and some of those guys came over we may have taken it off. They grew up doing jingles and they turned us on to some new techniques. We had two Ampex mixers. We had eight channels but one of them we used as an echo return, so we only had seven to cut all those songs with. Two mikes on the drums, one on the vocal, one on the horns, one on the bass, one on the guitar and one on the piano.
